Skype growth to 2014. Credit to TeleGeography
Big Growth in VOIP
As trends go, this one was perhaps one of the easier ones to spot in advance. Globally folk are moving from fixed lines and mobile phones to internet-based calls. That doesn’t mean that growth in mobile and fixed lines is stagnating. There’s growth there too. But not at the speed that VOIP is.
In 2013 Skype, the biggest player probably in the internet call business, recorded 214 billion minutes of international calls from one Skype app to another. Those figures do not include calls made from Skype to a regular phone.
Even more surprising is that Skype’s traffic was almost 40% the size of the entire conventional international telecom market. For every ten minutes on international phone calls, four minutes were spent on Skype. It’s slowly but surely taking over.
As impressive as this may seem the so-called public switched telephone networks are still a far larger and more comprehensive platform than anything that the internet has produced. So far at least. And that’s the big one isn’t it. Where will Skype be in the future.
Considering Skype is only ten years old the figures are hugely impressive. And it doesn’t seem that there will be a slow down any time soon. As internet speeds start to climb across the globe and entry level mobile gadgets become cheaper the take up on internet voice calling will increase.
After all why would you want to pay when you can get it for free?
